Report from Haiti

From The National Catholic Reporter...
U.S. guns arm Haiti's corrupt police force

By CLAIRE SCHAEFFER-DUFFY

Despite an arms embargo and numerous human rights reports that have documented widespread abuses committed by the Haitian police force, including killings, arbitrary arrests, beatings, illegal searches and detentions, the U.S. government continues to support the police with training, non-lethal equipment and guns.
A year ago, the State Department, the agency responsible for regulating international traffic in arms, sanctioned a transfer of 2,636 weapons to the Haitian National Police that included 1,900 .38 caliber revolvers, nearly 500 pistols, eight submachine guns and 13 M-14 rifles.
Additionally, the Haitian government has asked the U.S. agency to approve the sale of $1.7 million worth of weaponry. The sale would include several thousand small handguns, 500 12-guage shotguns and 200 M-14 rifles and Bushmasters, according to Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., who introduced legislation this summer that would require the State Department to document all weapons transactions to Haiti since the United States imposed an arms embargo on the Caribbean nation in October 1991.
In early June, the U.S. government gave $2.6 million worth of police equipment to Haiti. At a ceremony celebrating the donation of vehicles, motorcycles and protective gear, American Ambassador James Foley spoke of a supervision and training program that would allow the Haitian government to purchase arms in the United States.
“Those weapons are a very important element in the capacity of the Haitian police to ensure security,” Foley told Reuters.
Haiti’s security crisis is acute. Political and criminal violence has killed hundreds of people, including 51 police officers, since last September. This spring, a French diplomat and a Haitian employee of the International Red Cross were abducted and killed. Kidnappings have become frequent.
A 7,400-strong force of U.N. peacekeepers, which includes a contingent of civilian police, has not been able to quell the violence. The United Nations is investigating its own troops after a deadly assault in early July on Cité Soleil, Port-au-Prince’s largest slum, that resulted in the deaths of a popular gang leader and 20 residents, according to reports on the ground.
The Haitian police, the country’s only national security force, are woefully understaffed and ill-equipped. There are approximately 5,000 police officers for Haiti’s 8.6 million people. More than half of the police stations around the country were destroyed during last year’s coup that ousted former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Haiti’s interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue has asked the international community for more weapons to combat antigovernment forces, viewed by him as the primary perpetrators of the current violence.
But reports from groups like Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, the Center for the Study of Human Rights at the University of Miami Law School, and Refugees International have documented widespread abuses committed by the police that are exacerbating the violence in Haiti.
Excessive use of force among the Haitian National Police is common. Police have conducted deadly assaults rather than arrests and fired on crowds of peaceful protesters during demonstrations that have become frequent since Aristide’s ouster.
Most of the abuses have occurred in poor neighborhoods where support for Aristide remains strong. Last March residents of Cité Soleil told Refugees International that even though they were afraid of the criminals here, the police were worse. The residents said they did not trust the police.
Earlier this year, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged Haiti’s transitional government to investigate allegations of human rights violations committed by national police officers.
Attorney Tom Griffin, a former law enforcement official who wrote the University of Miami Law School report that documented police abuses in Haiti, said, “It is extremely dangerous to arm that police department. They are totally untrained scared guys with officers who have huge political interests against the poor.”
Griffin, a frequent visitor to Haiti, acknowledged the country’s deteriorating security situation but said funding reconciliation and disarmament programs would better serve the Haitian people. “More weapons don’t give you better police work,” he said, noting that just law enforcement required a respect for due process. “If they want to send handcuffs or bulletproof vests, all right. But not machine guns, not handguns,” he said.
Eric Calpas, regional director of the United Nation’s disarmament and demobilization program in Haiti, said the police need more equipment but said any transfer of weapons ought to be done through CIVPOL, the U.N. agency responsible for vetting and training the country’s police force.
“The [Haitian National Police] is very weak. We see a lot of corrupt elements,” Calpas said. “In the current context of Haiti, it would not be a good idea to send the weapons directly to them.”
Haiti is already overly armed and heavily militarized. Because of political instability most of the country’s weapons are unregulated, according to a report issued last April by the Small Arms Survey, a Geneva-based organization funded by the Swiss government. Written by arms control expert Robert Muggah, the report said the majority of weapons in the hands of Haiti’s armed factions have been “leaked” from official stockpiles. Human rights monitors have accused the Haitian police, some of whom are former members of the military, of funneling weapons to armed militias.
Muggah’s report states that although many nations have shipped arms to Haiti, the United States is the country’s biggest supplier of legal and covert weapons. The report also claims that in November 2004 a shipment of weapons valued at $6.95 million allegedly entered Haiti from the United States for “probable sale to the [Haitian National Police].”
A State Department official told NCR that the account of the November sale was “erroneous.” The official said the U.S. government’s program for training and supervising Haiti’s police force was “fully coordinated and complementary” with the efforts of CIVPOL.
Some observers fear importing weaponry to Haiti will undermine a U.N. disarmament effort that reportedly began this past spring.
“It is damaging to disarmament efforts to supply an unstable security sector with new weaponry when we know that some of those weapons will almost certainly end up in insurgent and criminal hands,” wrote Muggah in an op-ed article that appeared in the Canadian daily Globe and Mail last April.
The U.S. arms embargo on Haiti, imposed after a military coup ousted Aristide in the fall of 1991, allows for exceptions on a “case by case” basis. The embargo requires the State Department to notify Congress prior to any transfers or licensing of sales of weapons. Typically given to committee chairpersons, those notifications are not seen by most legislators, said Nathan Britton, communications officer for Rep. Lee.
Some observers have interpreted this year’s weapons transactions to Haiti as a reversal of the embargo. Although questioned repeatedly by NCR, State Department officials refused to say whether or not the ban on weapons sales remains in effect.
Earlier this summer, Lee introduced an amendment to the State Department Authorization Bill requiring that agency to document all weapons transactions to Haiti since the start of the arms embargo in October 1991. The House approved the authorization bill and sent it to the Senate for approval in July.
The congresswoman, who has also called for an investigation of U.S. participation in last year’s coup against Aristide, is concerned that the information about what has happened in Haiti “gets out there,” Britton said.
“The climate of intimidation and fear is mounting and too often the Haitian National Police are implicated as the offenders,” Lee said. “The United States must not be complicit in helping to arm criminals and Congress should be apprised to the United States’ role, if any, in arming criminals.”